


Quiet Light

by drawlight



Series: Chiaroscuro [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Apocalypse, Feelings Realization, Forbidden Love, Love, M/M, Melancholy, Mythology References, Oh Shit I Love You, Pining, Romance, Unconfessed Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-05
Updated: 2019-06-05
Packaged: 2020-04-08 07:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,905
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19102435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drawlight/pseuds/drawlight
Summary: There are rules. The trouble with hearts is that they play by none of them.





	Quiet Light

**Author's Note:**

> To the rosy-fingered dawn and her bit of hope. A little scrabble of something for the morning.

 

_"But I'm learning to lie here in the quiet light_

_While I watch the sky go from black to gray_

_Learning how not to die inside a little_

_Every time I think about you and wonder if you are awake."  
_

The National, _Quiet Light_

 

 _Ask me_ _about Patroclus._

In the Beginning, the Word was God and the Word was with God. That’s fairly simple, rather straightforward. There's no point in questioning the self-evident. There's little to ask the primary sources. The trouble is everything that came after.

We move through the world based on rules. Rules tell you where to go and when, which houses you can enter, how much cash to fork over for a pint. Angels and demons might play by other rules, yes, but the fact is that they are there. Laws and bylaws, this scaffolding of day-to-day. There are rules here too, even here in this black slate kitchen. Crowley sits at the little table. Crowley, hell-haired and still strangely sunglassed. Half his face is in shadow, half of him put away from view. One long hand lingers on a glass of whiskey. The bottle itself not much beyond his knuckles. Half-empty.

The trouble had come then, with  _after._ You see, the Word didn’t really get the funny business about hearts right. There are rules about love, who you can love. How and when. But you cannot tell a heart (they are no good at listening). The only law, really, the de facto business, is that you must never breathe a word. He doesn’t pray (he’s a _demon_ , for fuck’s sake) but he has memorized the tip of Aziraphale’s nose, the half-bitten smile, those book-dust hands. If he _did_ pray (let us theorize), then despite his laundry list of grievances with God, he might have given thanks. Just this once.

(No one escapes love.)

Tell me about a bandstand in the rain.

 _Come back, let this be the way it once was._ It had been an unsettling thing, walking away from the other man, doubting he will ever see him again. How many people do we pass, never speak to again? The day that your mother picked you up last passed without notice. Crowley, who has tripped and fallen twice in his blink of existence. Heaven is a long distance, a steeper fall. You’d think it would be the sharpest ache. (You would be wrong. The worst wounds happen where the skin is already thin. The most common ways to kill a man involve the heart. It is no mystery. If you stab the heart, it is nearly always fatal. Even to slice an artery is to run the heart dry, blood again, blood always. Cutting off heads is less common. It's why we worry about falling in love. _Be careful,_ we say, _I've got a weak heart._ )

See, that’s the trouble with things. There are rules. You can’t go around throwing your heart into just anyone’s arms. (Can you?) The angel and his uncertain face, his deadset mouth. _“We’re on opposite sides, Crowley.”_ Had sides ever really mattered? Hadn’t it really just been about them for so long, doesn’t a wink and a half-smile and six-fucking-thousand years of an Agreement get you _anything_ in this old town?

He rubs his thumb over his own skinny wrist. He can count the veins, the tendons. He has studied Aziraphale's from a distance. He has committed the number to memory, the atoms and the molecules, just in case. Just in case Aziraphale comes apart and Crowley will need to gather all the pieces up, put them back together again. Yes, he has learned Aziraphale like a recipe. One part skin and two parts bookdust-hair. A pinch of grey-leaf dusty miller. ( _Senecio cineraria._ Crowley and his plant-sick home. The soft-leaf shrub reminds him of Aziraphale, so he has lined his walls with it. When you have nothing, nothing to hold onto, you make your own little treasures. Dusty miller and its elegant, pale growth. Made for sun but beautiful in moonlight.)

They have never talked about it. Never. Not in Rome, not in London. _Never_ in Antioch. Crowley, blackjacketed and rust-haired, one hand running nervously over and over again over his knee, has known for nearly seven-hundred years. They had met on the edges of Venice. 1347. _“What’s the point of rainbows if God’s going to destroy the earth like this instead?”_ Aziraphale had given that odd half-smile, half-frown, that quick flick of darkened eyes, had shifted uncomfortably (later, much later, the British would adopt this national expression as a _stiff upper lip._ ). _“Not quite all of them.”_ Crowley had turned, black-tunic and leather-booted, his hair long then and a bit of a natural curl coming through. _“How many?”_ Aziraphale turned back to the house, watching the beakmasked doctors come in and leave again, taking their tallies of the living, yes, and the dead too. The air was thick with sick. With vomit and rot, necrotic buboes. That shitsick scent of the pomanders of ambergris and cloves, cinnamon and rosewater. (After, after, all perfumes will smell like plague to Crowley, even all these centuries later.) _“_ _One-third. One-third, Crowley.”_ And it was the quiver on the syllable, the twitch to the eye, the quiet catch of breath. That had been the first time that Crowley had realized that living in a human body for millennia can rub off on you. Is love endemic, can it be learned? Is it a virus, bloodborne and pathogenic? It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. It is in him as sure as _Yersinia pestis_ had climbed inside the town, the man in bed across the street in that blank-windowed house. Yes, snuck in when he wasn't looking, wasn't careful. Like a Greek soldier and their foul, lying horses.

 _What can you do?_ Nothing, nothing, nothing. This spit of nothing and never. He troubles a bit more whiskey into the glass. Watches the windows. It is dark outside. Dark, the deepest part of night before that inevitable march of morning. Crowley is, as all good demons should be, naturally _not_ a morning person. Sunrises are too garish, too bright, too much. But there is this, this quiet light of morning, this creep of dawn. It starts with the barest fade to grey.

He is thinking about Patroclus.

It had been the end of the world then too (at least to the Trojans, if you had asked them, but everyone only ever talks to the Greeks). Crowley had been there, Aziraphale in his white, picking through the edges and keeping an eye on things. At the edge of a building, there in the streets, he had paused over the corpse of a rat, picking his way over a spilled drink, watching Achilles and his arrow-numb fingers wrapping a linen bandage over Patroclus' upper arm. And what was it? Perhaps it was the smell of the nearby River Scamander, perhaps it was the strange light of the beginning of dawn (this palest fade to navy, to grey, to complication).  Perhaps it was just this, the too-close creep of Achilles' rough fingers to the inner dark of Patroclus' arm, the collapse of Patroclus into Achilles' chest.

Not all lovers must identify themselves. We can read it in other languages, other books. Crowley knows the maps here, can read paragraphs in the curl of these two sea eels, laid out to dry on a beach.

Tell me about the end of the world. Is it here? Is it there? We don't have to stay for it. Let's go off to the stars. To the edges. Let me tell you stories, let me take you back in time. If there is no way forward, let me make space for the two of us in the past. We can fit between paragraphs, in the margins, in an indentation. Give me a blank space on a page and a pen, I will write your name (and mine too) in there myself.

 _There is only one side, it was our side, goddammit._ He itches to shake the waistcoated man, to push him up against another wall, his fingers still salivate at the memory. There are rules. They should not be near each other. Angel and demon, demon and angel. The natural order of things. The rules, always. Immutable, fixed. They have never changed. No, do not take the Lord's name in vain, do not covet thy neighbor's wife, do not fall in love with someone on the other side. Very simple.

(Things change. That's the sticking point.)

He shifts. Black-jacketed arms, dark as a shroud, dark as a funeral veil. His face has gone to frog belly, to sour milk, to alewives dead on an empty shore. The rot of things. (He is a hellthing, rot should suit him.)  He moves from still to nervous energy. The pages of stars still at his feet, collapsed like they all will someday. Crowley knows how to play upon temptation, to introduce doubt, to plant seeds with upending roots. With Aziraphale, it is odd, it is different. He would wrap his snake-self around the other, cover the cotton curls with his bleak scales, perfect and tight. Yes, wrap around. If the world is burning, he would curl around like a shield, let his body take the brunt.

 _("Can I tempt you - Oh wait, that's your job."_ Crowley does not dwell on the physical. _Can an angel feel want? Human want? Physical? You're in a body, sure, but is it different?_ He is a demon, there is no escaping the sick of want, the creep of desire. He does not think about it. A brush of fingers, the curve of a lip. He _certainly_ does not imagine what a night might bring. Consider a bed. Consider hungry mouths and wandering arms, a kiss pressed to your neck, to your throat, your eyelids too. He knows that if, _if_ such a night happened, he would steal the sheets from the bed. They would be damp with the wet of themselves; he would have to wring them out first. Yes, he would like to take them with him, the scene set of their one night. If it, theoretically say, happened in a forest, he would cut down the trees.)

 _Whenever you want, Angel. Wherever you want to go._ Anywhere, anywhere. The Universe lists off into the distance. Crowley knows the exact measure of space. He has watched it, this strange expansion. He can name every star in the sky. Spica and Pollux, Polaris there leading us all forward. _Let's go take a spin on Proxima Centauri. How long has it been since I've taken you there?_

So, what is left? There is a war. Let us count only on the dawn. So Crowley and his antsy fingers through Mars-storm hair, red and wild and bewildered, in his chair at a table. Half-drunk, half-sick, staring at the window and counting on the coming of the sun. The sky shifts slowly to the first march of nautical dawn, the blackest of navy-blues. But it is the dawn, the quiet march of light. Steady as a wave, steady.

Let me tell you the trouble with hearts. We can smell the sulfur, hear the coming of the drums. It does not matter. The war comes but he keeps the bandages in a pocket, a map of the stars too.

We've been wrong about the end of the world before.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me stories at https://drawlight.tumblr.com/.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Quiet Light [podfic]](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19588675) by [KD reads (KDHeart)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KDHeart/pseuds/KD%20reads)




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